notes on issue 12 contributors
Luís Costa (he/they) is the author of Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat (fourteen poems). His poems have appeared in Queerlings, Stone of Madness, Roi Fainéant, Visual Verse, Boats Against The Current, Anthropocene, and elsewhere. Luís is one of the founding editors of the Seaford Review, holds a PhD from Goldsmiths and lives in London, but you can find him often in Lisbon and Warsaw, or on social media @captainiberia. Hélène Demetriades’s debut collection The Plumb Line was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She was longlisted in The National, shortlisted in The Bridport, and highly commended in the international Fool For Poetry Chapbook competition 2023. She won The Silver Wyvern, Poetry On The Lake, 2022. She is published in magazines, including Lighthouse Journal, The Alchemy Spoon and Finished Creatures. She lives in South Devon, and works as a transpersonal psychotherapist. Nathan Evans is a writer and performer based in London. His poetry has been published by Muswell Press, Royal Society of Literature, Manchester Metropolitan University, fourteen poems, Broken Sleep. His first collection, Threads, was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize; he hosts BOLD Queer Poetry Soirée. Orestes Fiotakis was born in Chania, Crete, in 2001. He studied Direction at the National Theatre of Greece. His yet unpublished work consists of four plays, two poetry collections, a lot of short stories and two novels. His stories are characterized by experimental narrative, extreme characters and situations, violence, liminal spaces, nature, queerness, childhood, myths, archetypes, ecstasy, and the loss of innocence. Krystalli Kyparissi (Glyniadakis) was born in Athens in 1979. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA and a PhD in Media & Comms from the university of Bournemouth, and has been working as a translator of Norwegian literature into Greek for many, many years. She’s published four poetry collections in Greek and was awarded the National Literature Award for poetry in 2018. A wanderer with a wheelchair, Harriet Jae lives in Ghent, Belgium. Commended in the 2023 National Poetry Competition, her work has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere. Harriet has been longlisted for Mslexia’s single poem and pamphlet competitions, and shortlisted for the Bridport and the Live Canon Pamphlet Prizes. In 2023 she was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition. Katerina Kozi is an artist and writer from Greece. She writes poetry and short stories both in Greek and English, exploring themes such as human connections, feelings, gender expression and sexuality. Some of her poems and short stories have been published in anthologies and online poetry magazines. Carlos Lumbre is a PhD student in Biology settled in Granada (Spain). He is interested in exploring his identity as a queer proletarian, having grown up in a rural setting in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the 21st century. He is a member of two writing clubs and is finding his way into poetry. Simon Maddrell has appeared in Acumen, Magma, The Moth, Poetry Wales, Stand, Under the Radar. Simon’s pamphlets include: Throatbone (UnCollected Press), Queerfella, (joint-winner, The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020), Isle of Sin (Polari Press), The Whole Island (Valley Press) and a finger in derek jarman’s mouth (Polari Press). Caroline Maldonado lives in the UK and Italy and has translated four Italian collections for Smokestack Books (2013-22). She chaired the MPT’s board of trustees for seven years. Her own poems are in her collection Faultlines (Vole Books, 2022) and two pamphlets, What they say in Avenale (IDP, 2014), and Mirror and Stone, poems in response to Michelangelo, illustrated by Garry Kennard (GVart, 2024). Robin Park was born in Suwon, raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Oxford. She is an alumna of Barbican Young Poets and the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in data science. Piero Toto (he/lui) is a London-based bilingual poet, Italian translator and translation lecturer, with poems in Poetry London, fourteen poems and Queer Life, Queer Love II (Muswell Press, 2023) amongst other publications. In Italy he has published poetry pamphlet tempo 4/4 (Transeuropa Edizioni, 2021) and contributes to lit-blogs Atelier and Laboratori Poesia translating contemporary UK poets into Italian. Sidrah Zubair is a poet and teacher from London. Her poems have appeared in bath magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Atrium, Poetry Wales, Lucent Dreaming and Anthropocene.